Child safety standards

We do not allow child sexual abuse material, grooming, sexualised content about minors, or any attempt to meet or exploit a child. This applies to everything in the app: letters, chats, photos, names and book pages.

Teens meet only teens, and adults meet only adults. Letters, bottles and magpies never cross the wall, so an adult cannot find a teen as a new person, and the other way round.

We ask for a birth date. The birth date a person gives decides their sea: 13 to 17 is the teen sea, 18 and over the adult sea. A report that someone seems younger than 18 in the adult sea, or seems to be an adult in the teen sea, can pause that person’s sea while one of our team checks.

The birth date is what a person tells us, not proof. We don’t ask for ID or photos to check age today. Reports from other people help us catch what it misses. If an account does not belong in its sea, we close it, and the identity of a closed account that failed the age rules is kept so it can’t simply sign up again.

• New people never see a birth date, an exact location, whether someone is online or a username. Distances are rounded to 100 km.
• Every word a stranger sends goes through our rules filter before the other person sees it. Links, handles and numbers can’t travel in a first letter.
• After two people meet by letter, our servers check their chat for money requests and other signs of a scam.
• The app removes location data from photos before they are sent.
• Anyone can block or report from the app, and we don’t tell the other person who reported them.
• Teens have the same limits on photos as adults, described below.

People who meet by letter can’t send each other photos until each has sent several messages and the receiver has said yes to photos from that person. The yes is for one person, starts off, and can be turned off at any time. It is the same in the teen sea. Voice notes follow the same rules as photos.

A profile picture shows to friends and to new people you are meeting by letter, unless they turned off pictures from new people. A report hides it for the person reporting at once and sends it to be reviewed.

In the app, open the person, letter or chat and choose Report. Reasons include “seems younger than 18” and “seems to be an adult”. You can also write to the child safety contact below. We aim to act quickly, and a person reads each report. While they look, the account’s sea can be paused.

We hide the content, suspend the account and keep the evidence the law asks us to keep. When someone seems to be an adult in the teen sea, or gives a false age to get into the other sea, a person looks at it, and we close the account if it does not belong. We report child sexual abuse material to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (Cybertip.ca), as Canadian law requires, and to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and we tell the police where the law requires it. We cooperate with valid requests from law enforcement.

Talk with your teen about who they write to. The birthday they type decides their sea; it is not proof of age. To report a concern, or to ask to see, correct or delete a teen’s island, write to the contact below.

Write to hello@seapals.app about child safety.